trademarks [was: xulrunner 2.0 in rawhide (F15) bundles several system libs]

[Tomas Mraz]

On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 16:41 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: 
> On 10/06/2010 04:08 PM, Michal Schmidt wrote:
> > On Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:26:59 +0200 Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> >> On 10/06/2010 02:49 PM, Matej Cepl wrote:
> >>> Nonsense, trademarks exists to protect users and to avoid living off
> >>> somebody else brand recognition.
> >>
> >> I disagree - trademarks exist to protect the manufacturer from
> >> loosing profits because of their products being copied.
> >>
> >> Ask Adidas or Nike why they sue Chinese manufacturers and you'll see.
> >> They'll tell you that they loose money because of being copied.
> >
> > Of course. But there's in fact no disagreement, only looking at
> > different aspects of the same thing.
> >
> > Why do you think the copying takes place? Because the companies have
> > built a good reputation and brand, allowing them to increase profit.
> >
> > Good quality =>  good reputation =>  solid brand =>  better profits.
> 
> I am not disagreeing that restrictive trademarks, patents, restricive 
> license etc. all make sense in the commerical world.
> 
> However, this here is Fedora, a project that once was aiming at 
> "Freedom" - As trivial as it is, restrictive trademark policies simply 
> do not fit into this philosophy.
I give +1 to this. On the other hand Fedora also is (was?) a project
where individual package maintainers had the biggest influence on what
packages ship if they do not cross some fundamental legal limits. This
changed in many ways recently and the restrictions and requirements are
more and more technical, not just legal, and even controversial. The
problem here really is that some "not so important?" projects are forced
to accept all the restrictions and requirements and other "more
important?" projects get a free pass from them. This is unfortunate and
it does not improve the spirit of the package maintainers.

-- 
Tomas Mraz
No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back.
                                              Turkish proverb